Why You Shouldn't Have An Expensive Wedding

Tell Your Fiancee This: New Study Proves Couples Who Spend More On Their Weddings Divorce More Often

If you’re about to get married, and your fiancée is complaining you’re being, well, just a teensy bit too thrifty in your big-day spending, or if you’re a married man whose wife feels you cheaped out on the big day, you’ve got some powerful new ammo to argue back with. You see, it turns out that if you spend more money on your actual wedding day, you're more likely to get divorced.

Two professors of economics at Emory University, Hugo Mialon and Andrew Francis, just released a study in which they surveyed the marriage lengths and wedding costs of over 3,000 people. Their conclusion: “we find evidence that marriage duration is inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and wedding ceremony.”

See, according the TheKnot.com, the average wedding in the US runs about $30,000, but Mialon and Francis argue that you shouldn’t be spending anywhere near that. In other words, it might be a good idea to control your wedding expenses.

“In particular, in the sample of women, the hazard of divorce associated with spending more than $20,000 on the wedding is 3.5 times higher than the hazard of divorce associated with spending between $5,000 and $10,000,” the report states.

It doesn’t stop there though. You know those De Beers ads telling you to spend months of salary on an engagement ring? They might actually cause you to be divorced sooner. On an engagement ring, you want to be spending between $500 and $2,000 as opposed to higher numbers:

“Spending between $2,000 and $4,000 on an engagement ring is significantly associated with an increase in the hazard of divorce in the sample of men. Specifically, in the sample of men, spending between $2,000 and $4,000 on an engagement ring is associated with a 1.3 times greater hazard of divorce as compared to spending between $500 and $2,000." (Once you go into higher numbers, like over $8,000, the risk of divorce decreases, but don’t tell your fiancée that.)

The costs, and complication, of weddings have been increasing the past decades, and one which Francis and Mialon think will continue. “This is a troubling trend that we believe is driven in large part by the profit motives of the wedding industry,” the study’s authors told me in an e-mail.

The study’s finding actually went way beyond what they’d expected to find:

“At the outset, we actually expected to find no correlation at all between wedding expenses and marriage duration, which would have been an interesting result too. The multi-billion dollar diamond and wedding industries have succeeded in making many of us (men and woman alike) believe that expensive engagement rings and weddings are positive correlated with marriage duration. But we found a negative correlation,” they said.

The reason behind all this might all be pretty simple. Spend more on your wedding, go more into debt, and you’ll increase the stress on your marriage, or in their words “it is possible that wedding expenses raise the likelihood of marital dissolution given that prior literature suggests a link between economic stress and marital dissolution.”

Oh, and if you’re wondering? They didn’t do this study just as a way to cheap out on their weddings. We asked that, too.